TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Fans Worry About the Film Version...of Green Lantern

That’s right.In much the same way we libertarians have been worrying about whether the Atlas Shrugged movie(s?) is (will be?) any good, we comics/sci-fi nerds have been worrying about June’s Green Lantern movie.

The comic is about an impressive intergalactic police force from thousands of planets that keeps the peace throughout space and has existed for billions of years. Yet the early trailers made Earth’s Green Lantern, Hal Jordan (played by Ryan Reynolds), look a bit goofy, and the special effects were a bit cheesy, and only this very month did they get around to casting Geoffrey Rush and that gigantic guy from Green Mile, Michael Clarke Duncan, as the voice actors for a couple of the computer-animated Green Lantern Corps members.

That may not be unusual but is still a little worrying given that the film is out in two months.(Of course, by living in fear of how the film will turn out, we risk empowering the fear-demon Parallax, so best not to think about it.)Perhaps I’ll audition for a role in a few weeks, if they’re still putting the finishing touches on it.(I would enjoy playing Krona, the villain around whom I built one of the stories I wrote for DC Comics – in JLA Showcase #1, for real.)

Michael Clarke Duncan is voicing a big bruiser of an alien named Kilowog, which unfortunately sounds as if it means “possessing the power of a thousand swarthy people” but does not.Kilowog has the strange honor of being voiced by two interesting actors this summer, the other being punk rocker and comics fan Henry Rollins, who is also large (in the DVD cartoon Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, out ten days before the live-action film).George Tabb, a punk rocker in his own right (with the band Furious George) and a NYPress columnist back in the day, once likened a snapping turtle’s neck to that of Rollins in order to explain how impressive the snapping turtle was.

Well, the Corps has 3,600 (or more recently 7,200) members, so at least some of them are bound to be cool, right?And with that many power rings floating around the universe, there’s a decent chance that the next Green Lantern...will be you.

(In the meantime, remember: from about 6:20pm to 7:06pm, catch my post-Atlas tweets direct from Metro North – bound from Midtown Manhattan to the Foundation for Economic Education – reacting to Atlas Shrugged, if all goes as planned.)